HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) streaming has caught on in recent years as an efficient and simple streaming solution using existing infrastructure (e.g., HTTP caches and web servers). In HTTP streaming, combined video and audio is divided into small fragments, which are individually addressable by unique URLs. The client requests the small combined fragments of video and audio using an HTTP Request/Response mechanism. The downloaded fragments are then played back sequentially.
HTTP streaming may support live event streaming as well as adaptive streaming (e.g., switching to different bitrates of the stream according to available bandwidth). Moreover, HTTP streaming may provide a cheaper alternative to real-time streaming, which uses dedicated servers and cache.
Some media players may consume media in an interleaved format where the audio and video samples are interleaved in a time ordered fashion. Since audio and video can be fetched from different sources, there is a need to multiplex video and audio before sending the data to the player. Such multiplexing is performed by the servers. Moreover, in some instances, a number of supplementary audio streams may be supported for a single video sequence. One example of such an instance is to support multiple languages. For example, audio tracks may be available in English, French, Spanish, German, and Dutch for the same video program. In such instances, if an alternate track (e.g., different language track or different camera angle, etc.) has to be added to the media, then the content has to be repackaged (e.g., re-multiplexed) at the server. This entails duplication of the video to accommodate the new track. As a result, to cover the various possibilities of video/language combinations, the server must publish each of those combinations.